A Different Kind Of Story Time

I gave my daughter a book to read about women and story-times, and she came back the next morning with tears on her face. She'd stayed up all night - reading. She was wretched, wringing her hands and scolding me, "MOM, you have to tell me your story, please, MOM. Tell me your story until it's in my memory, until it's a part of me, Mom, please..."

 - and I was stunned.

Don't I have keepsakes - scattered throughout the house, and videos, and photo albums, old antique stuff and ... more stuff? She knows those stories...

Am I not a modern mom, with every moment of her life snapped and saved on Instagram, Facebook, and Google Drive?

"No!" she wept,"I want YOU to tell me YOUR stories over and over again, until they're embedded in MY MEMORY as if it's MY story..."

... and slowly, like a savannah sunrise - silent, crisp and clear, breaking dawn approaching far out on the horizon, my mind began to paint colours on the blank canvas of my mind, and I began to envision what my daughter yearned for as she wrung her hands with big fat heavy tears slowly streaming down her face.

She yearns to KNOW, to feel my sun on her face, walk the same dusty roads I trod, barefoot, as a child, reach the same exhilarating heights as I climbed forbidden gnarled Flame Trees during the hot tropical dry seasons, to feel the frigid cold of crystal clear pools, hidden at  the bottom of waterfalls, canopied by vines and creepers, feel the wet rocks under her bare feet, slick and slimy green with moss.
I found out to my utter dismay that I've cheated on my children.

I've collected photographs over the years, snapping away exuberantly on my camera, switching from preserving memories of their childhood from ancient film&negatives and albums to clicking away and storing files on GoogleDrive or iCloud.

I've cut snippets of my childrens baby hair and taped them to books, painted my babies palms with brown brown lipstick and made tiny little- hand prints, saved their kindergarten scribbles - in labelled files, and collected all their feathers,stones, pieces of wood and shells in different labelled shoe boxes... the list goes on... my mother didn't keep her wedding dress for me, and I burnt mine in an abrupt fit of anger when that marriage failed.. but why was I keeping it? Duh, as a keepsake, as a part of history for my sons and daughters.

I was chatting a male friend and he said he hardly has 'stuff'' and was vehement about his belief in his lack of materialism, but my argument wasn't about buying material THINGS for the sake of it, or turning the terrible habit of hording in to a fine art, but rather, keeping collectables for memories sake....

"That's cheating",  he said, "my Memories are in my head..!"

Long ago, memories were handed down in the form of stories.I remember us kids gathering around my bald great grandfather on the earthen floor of his mud hut, me scrunching my nose at the spicy earthy scent that permeated the hut, him sitting on a three legged stool arranging the heavy shawls over one skimpy shoulder, his cane on the floor at his feet, majestic in beauty, earrings galore dangling from his cut,styled and drooping earlobes - we'd ask him if we could 'feel' those beautiful stretched lobes and with our tiny hands we would sit on his lap exploring every inch of his face, poking gently and asking him if it 'hurt', and he'd laugh softly and talk in a sing song accent, sweeter than that of my parents, saying No, it didn't hurt.
In the dark of his hut as the sun set and the earth outside cooled, as we came in from playing outside, he would enthrall us with tales of his youth, of lion hunting and crocodile infested river crossings, until one day, when he was telling the stories I'd know them by heart, I would be the one walking through the tall savannah grasses with other youth, stopping dead in our tracks in silence when we first smelt then felt the change in the air, in the crickets and birds, at the approach of the total predator, the King of Beasts..

I have, I realized, robbed my own children.

I have not sat them down and told them the stories.

They haven't sat, rapt with attention, listening as I told them about my stories, my mothers stories, my fathers and grandfathers stories...

The outcome is a total breakdown, of stories getting lost, and our youth screaming out in the outrage of being robbed.
Instead of giving our children our stories, we read to them about the white's stories and fables, stories of Cinderella waiting for her Prince Charming, and Snow White living with Seven Little Men, and ..
our culture was lost.

I've made an appointment with my daughter, I will sit her down and tell her one simple short story. Then I will tell her another one another day. In the time it takes to go from point A to point B, I will stop being a TwitFace and instead tell my daughter a simple story,  a simple single Memory of myself and my mother, her mother's mother, until, one day, she will weave and interlock all the stories, form her timeline, add her own, then repeat the stories, as her own.

At which point, she will be complete.

I know this may be a hard task to do, but tell your stories. Your very own. Tell the truth as best as you can without embellishment or exaggeration. Tell of the good, and the bad.
Tell of how poor you were, how you would lie awake at night, terrified of rats blowing your toes before they bit. Or tell of carrying buckets twice your size as a child to a flat on the fourth floor during the dry season. Or of crossing the road between South B and South C and encountering Lions...
Tell your story.
Tell your story, instead of picking a bed time story about Hansel and Gretel, just talk. It doesn't matter how old your children are. Just talk... Until the day they tell the story as if it was they themselves who walked that way, bare feet creating a path in an age old forest filled with black-barked indigenous trees, somewhere in Africa...

Nyakio J. Munyinyi for the XpenSieve Report© 2015

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